Environment

of global warming as well as speciesextinction, ocean dead zones, water pollution and habitat destruction.

Withglobal meat demand predicted to increase 73 per cent by 2050 due to increasing wealthin countries like China and India, alternative options are becoming increasingly important.

Revolution

For decades, people haveattempted to make artificial meat, but the appeal has been limited, because theimitation has never been that convincing.

But recently, there has been a meatreplacement food tech revolution.

Instead of trying to take a product like tofuand pass it off as real meat like before, companies are now working out whatmakes meat taste like meat, and are then rebuilding it from the molecular levelusing plants.

Results

Beyond Meat was founded in 2009, and boast several highprofile investors including Twitter executive director Biz Stone.

ImpossibleFoods is a similar company also pioneering this new wave of meat replacementproducts.

In 2015 Impossible Foods turned down a $300 million offer by Google and in July2016, the company launched its first burger.

The Impossible Burger was launched in July 2016. Even burger snobs said it compared to a traditional meat burger

Lab meat

Lab grown meat is another type ofartificial meat.

This technique consists of harvesting a small sample of muscletissue from an animal.

Individual cells are separated and then placed into aculture where they start dividing and growing before being layered together toform meat patties.

It is a controversial practice among some vegans as the cells must be harvested from an animal, meaning the final product is not vegan-friendly.

, the world’s first labgrown burger was unveiled to the world by Dr Mark Post from the University ofMaastrickt in the Netherlands.

But it carried a tremendous price tag of $250,000.A little over two years later, Mark Post and his team came back with a burgerbeing produced for a mere $11 dollars.

Other groups doing similar work include companiesModern Meadow, Memphis Meats and Supermeat.

By the year 2020, the meatsubstitute market is

With theurgency of the climate impact and ethical concerns of the animal agriculturalindustries, there is a ground swell for meat alternatives to capture marketshare and overtake the production of traditional meat.

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